{"id":418,"date":"2011-01-09T21:15:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T04:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdhive.org\/glob\/?p=418"},"modified":"2012-05-24T22:56:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-25T05:56:13","slug":"tron-reloaded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/?p=418","title":{"rendered":"Tron Reloaded"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1104001\/\">Tron: Legacy<\/a> twice now, and I think that&#8217;s enough for me to follow up my previous post about the original Tron.\u00a0 There&#8217;s so much to comment on in this (long!) movie that I really need to be able to pause it to make note of everything though.<\/p>\n<p>The good: Overall I enjoyed it.\u00a0 It was not incompetently done, the soundtrack was great, the visuals were nice and it properly sequeled the first story.\u00a0 It picked up the theme of parallels from the first movie and continued it somewhat.\u00a0 And it left several loose ends for a third movie to pick up. Things I liked:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>CLU is pretty much the same program he was in the original; dogged, determined to accomplish his task, unafraid of authority but unimaginative.<\/li>\n<li>The solar sail ride to the finish line nicely parallels the one in the first movie.<\/li>\n<li>The carrier is reborn.\u00a0 New shape but still really cool looking.<\/li>\n<li>The light cycle sequence.\u00a0 After seeing the trailers I was griping about this since they weren&#8217;t following rectilinear paths, but it actually worked out well.\u00a0 It was a pretty exciting scene.<\/li>\n<li>The music, and the nice touch that Daft Punk were personified in the club scene as the DJs.\u00a0 I actually didn&#8217;t like the music as it was applied to the trailers, but in the actual film it worked.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The bad: It had more wince moments than the original and I really do not like where they went with the visual and sound design.\u00a0 The environmental sounds lost their deliberately artificial aspect that helped reinforce the unreality of the digital environment, and the visual design lost the abstraction that was the best part of the visuals in the first movie.\u00a0 Case in point: the Recognizers.\u00a0 In <em>Tron<\/em>, they were an assemblage of disconnected blocks, appearing that way because that&#8217;s how they were designed by some user (Flynn).\u00a0 In <em>Tron Legacy<\/em>, someone clearly put some thought into making the recognizers resemble functional machines: all the parts are connected, it has a reaction-based propulsion system, and there is a mechanical way of loading and unloading passengers and crew.\u00a0 None of that is necessary, and it destroys one of my favorite aspects of the property.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not necessary because this is not a physical environment.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a designed world where things work because someone says they work.\u00a0 Same goes for the glass city environment &#8211; reflections and feelings of solidity aren&#8217;t needed.\u00a0 I preferred the outlined, solid-because-someone-said-so shapes of the original.<\/p>\n<p>Overall <em>Tron: Legacy<\/em> is both better and worse than I expected.\u00a0 It was a letdown relative to my hopes, but a relief relative to my fears.\u00a0 I will likely watch it several more times over the next few decades.<\/p>\n<p>And now every nerd&#8217;s favorite part: the nitpicking!\u00a0 I&#8217;ll try to do this in roughly linear order, but it&#8217;s a long movie and my memory is poor so I might leave stuff out.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The young versions of Flynn aren&#8217;t very well done as CG goes these days; his eyes look dead and his skin looks like he&#8217;s been taking beauty tips from Odo.<\/li>\n<li>Why are there Tron movie posters and toys in this world?\u00a0 Are we to assume Flynn released <em>Tron<\/em> or a similar film in his universe to tell the tale of his adventures with the MCP?\u00a0 He obviously has announced the existence of the digital realm publically &#8211; and where&#8217;s the world-shattering fallout from that?\u00a0 People around the world should have been all over that one.<\/li>\n<li>The opening monologue was kind of lame.<\/li>\n<li>Alan presumably knows what happened to Flynn in the first movie; why didn&#8217;t he search for him in the digital world when he went missing?<\/li>\n<li>Seeing the big red door and hearing the same comment about it again was a nice touch, but why was it in the plot?\u00a0 Why would Sam go through the ostensibly most secure door to sneak into an office building?\u00a0 And why do they even have that door if you can get from there to a poorly guarded stairwell?<\/li>\n<li>Pulling his parachute that late would result in dead.<\/li>\n<li>The motorcycle chase scene was jarring since I recognized all the locations, and they&#8217;re not physically connected that way! :)<\/li>\n<li>Why are all the games still in the arcade?\u00a0 If Flynn is missing presumed dead, something would have been done with them; they&#8217;re all collectors&#8217; items by now.<\/li>\n<li>Again with the fake computer hacking text scrolly stuff!\u00a0 &#8216;Whoami&#8217; is a real command and appropriate to the situation, but all the rest was the usual insulting crap.<\/li>\n<li>Why is there an analogue of Flynn&#8217;s arcade in the digital world?\u00a0 Do programs play video games inside video games?\u00a0 And why hadn&#8217;t CLU paved it over as an imperfection?<\/li>\n<li>Why is the portal to return to the meat world in a different digital world location from the point of arrival?\u00a0 Granted the same was true in the first movie, but this one made me realize it doesn&#8217;t make a whole lot of sense.<\/li>\n<li>As mentioned above, why does the Recognizer have jets?\u00a0 They&#8217;re not necessary!\u00a0 It moves because that&#8217;s how Flynn defined it when he wrote Space Paranoids.<\/li>\n<li>Sam acquits himself well in the disk battles, despite showing no aptitude for athletics or sports, or even video games for that matter.\u00a0 He later comments that the light cycle game is more his bag, which drives it home: as far as we know he&#8217;s a motorcycle enthusiast with philanthropy and practical joke streaks.\u00a0 TRON was designed to be a survivor.\u00a0 Flynn wrote the games.\u00a0 They both have reasons to be good at them; Sam doesn&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li>Why does CLU wear a helmet to spectate at the games?\u00a0 Obviously so he can appear on-screen without spoiling the Big Reveal a few minutes later, but it&#8217;s out of character and pretentious.\u00a0 The same thing could have been accomplished with a rear or silhouette view.<\/li>\n<li>The guy with the blue visor.\u00a0 You can just tell he&#8217;s going to get iced by CLU.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll call it good character design to convey that right from the beginning.<\/li>\n<li>The light cycle thing.\u00a0 I liked it.\u00a0 The addition of multiple levels and ramps to the playfield is a good idea.\u00a0 I would complain about them following curved paths but the cycles in the original movie could do that too; they just didn&#8217;t do so while in game mode.\u00a0 We didn&#8217;t need to see spinning engine parts though, again because they don&#8217;t need to exist here.<\/li>\n<li>The scene were Sam and Cora are driving through the wastelands &#8211; her driving looks so fake.\u00a0 She&#8217;s just randomly jerking the wheel.\u00a0 And if she&#8217;s such a precious resource to Flynn, why does he let her go snoop around in the city?\u00a0 He could just cook up another program for that.<\/li>\n<li>Ah yes, the classic perfection error.\u00a0 Flynn uncorked a genie in CLU, and now he&#8217;s complaining that his wish was granted.\u00a0 You&#8217;d think that people would have learned to word their wishes more carefully after the number of times this plot framework has been used.<\/li>\n<li>Books in the digital world &#8211; downloaded from Project Gutenberg, I assume.<\/li>\n<li>There are digital suckling pigs to eat?<\/li>\n<li>Costumes &#8211; the costume designs were crap in this movie.\u00a0 Filming the costume scenes for the original movie was a buttload of work (see the Making Of stuff on the Tron deluxe edition DVD), but it looked awesome.\u00a0 With the CG technology we have today it should have been easy to beat, but instead it looks like everyone was wearing wetsuits with some haphazardly applied retro-reflective tape on them.<\/li>\n<li>ZEUS.\u00a0 Gah, I wanted to strangle him from the moment he appeared on screen.\u00a0 What an irritating character!\u00a0 And you just knew he was a traitor immediately &#8211; no surprise there at all.\u00a0 And all that capering about and maniacal laughter and random shooting &#8211; WTF was that?\u00a0 Not a believable character at all.<\/li>\n<li>Does the train represent a slow download? :)<\/li>\n<li>Cora&#8217;s origin story.\u00a0 OK, so these ISOs (dumb name!) naturally evolved in the digital world.\u00a0 That&#8217;s cool, and a good story idea.\u00a0 Why do they look humanoid?\u00a0 (For that matter, why do programs look humanoid?\u00a0 We&#8217;re told programs resemble their authors, but these ISOs don&#8217;t have authors and needn&#8217;t even have a humanoid shape.\u00a0 We saw several nonhumanoid creatures in the first movie.)<\/li>\n<li>Cora is the last of her kind.\u00a0 Oh please, really?\u00a0 That always happens!<\/li>\n<li>CLU wants to invade meatspace.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 He hasn&#8217;t finished imposing his idea of perfection on the digital world yet, from what I can see.\u00a0 And wouldn&#8217;t it be funny if all his machines stopped working the moment they emerged in the real world?\u00a0 Different laws of physics, bub!\u00a0 Also, if the laser only has enough energy to keep the portal open for a few minutes realtime, where&#8217;s it going to find the juice to fabricate an entire army out of nothing?<\/li>\n<li>The aerial combat scene &#8211; why do the aircraft leave solid trails like the light cycles?\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t make sense in such an unconstrained environment.<\/li>\n<li>Why does TRON have a conscience attack at that particular moment?\u00a0 Well, I guess that&#8217;s typical of brainwashed villains; a second later and he would have won.\u00a0 I could buy it if Flynn had used some of his user mojo on TRON when they made eye contact, but he didn&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li>Why does Flynn necessarily have to merge with CLU to destroy him, and why does he have to be destroyed in the process?\u00a0 He created CLU out of nothing without apparent sacrifice.\u00a0 This makes no sense.<\/li>\n<li>The Lion&#8217;s Gate bridge is never that devoid of traffic!<\/li>\n<li>Cora&#8217;s existence in meatspace raises lots of questions.\u00a0 Is she made of meat now?\u00a0 If so, what kind &#8211; does she have a human-like biology?\u00a0 How did the computer manage to invent one for her that left her looking the same?\u00a0 And if all that Flynn said about the wonders of her body (heh) holds true, she&#8217;s going to have to steer clear of biologists or else end up in a lab somewhere.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen Tron: Legacy twice now, and I think that&#8217;s enough for me to follow up my previous post about the original Tron.\u00a0 There&#8217;s so much to comment on in this (long!) movie that I really need to be able to pause it to make note of everything though. The good: Overall I enjoyed it.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-filmreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2206,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/2206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}